3 posts categorized "Weblogs"

Bread for the World Institute policy analysts Faustine Wabwire and Scott Bleggi were invited to a roll out of USAID’s new campaign called “FWD”, which stands for Famine, War, and Drought.  They participated in a briefing by USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah and senior White House officials Gayle Smith and Jon Carson on how to help others learn about these issues, and to announce that information from the site may be freely used by individuals in social media and on personal web sites.

Shah addressed two issues that Bread for the World is strongly advocating – improving the nutritional value of food aid provided by the United States and elevating nutrition in Feed the Future programming.  He said food aid is being prepositioned around the world so that it can be delivered more quickly, and new, more nutritious formulations of Corn Soy Blend - the product most often provided in general distribution food aid - are being made available to donor organizations.  USAID’s Feed the Future initiative is a major development assistance effort to reduce poverty and malnutrition by sustainably improving economic, environmental and human security. 

A video produced in cooperation with the AdCouncil was also released faeaturing celebrity advocates:

Forward the information so others can become advocates for famine, war and drought relief in Africa!

Scott Bleggi is a senior international policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.

“Close the border!” It’s the clarion call of anti-immigration advocates. And for most Americans, securing and controlling the border is a reasonable and even necessary right for a sovereign nation.

But in spite of its perennial popularity, border enforcement historically has failed to deter immigrants from entering the country and illegal immigration grew in concert with increased enforcement since at least the 1980s.

Now the tide seems to be turning (at least temporarily).

In 2007 the country’s number of unauthorized immigrants peaked at 11.8 million, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). By 2009, DHS reported that the illegal immigrant population dropped to 10.8 million and the numbers for 2010 may show further reductions.

This is the first two-year consecutive decrease in illegal immigration in decades. Now the big question is: Why?

The consensus among many experts has been that unauthorized immigration is driven by economic conditions: Latin American immigrants are motivated by a combination of poverty and lack of jobs in their home countries and the abundance of jobs and higher wages in the United States. As long as there were jobs open in the U.S. and poverty persisted in Latin America, immigrants were not deterred by the militarization and dangers of crossing the border.

In fact, until recently, some experts indicated that the border enforcement escalation of the 1990s and 2000s actually led to fewer immigrant apprehensions as immigrants were pushed to more remote border crossings where there were fewer Border Patrol agents – Arizona’s Sonora desert, for example.

But in the past week, several analysts (and the DHS) have claimed that the reduced illegal immigration numbers are due to improved enforcement. Writer Edward Schumacher-Matos wrote in The Washington Post that “enforcement is working, something that many pro-immigration activists hate to admit and that restrictionists refuse to recognize.”

To bolster his claim, Schumacher-Matos notes the decline in the number of illegal immigrants: only 175,000 entered between March 2008 and March 2009 compared to 650,000 in 2005. He also notes that the Border Patrol recorded a 70% reduction in apprehensions last year.

While there is no reason to dispute the numbers, the logic is flawed. Lower numbers of illegal crossings doesn’t mean that the Border Patrol is all of a sudden more successfully deterring immigrants.

The drop in illegal immigration has coincided with another recent change in America: The Great Recession. Fewer immigrants are journeying to the U.S. because there aren’t as many jobs. About 60% of the jobs lost during the recession were in construction, manufacturing, and commerce – sectors that employ the majority of Latin American migrant workers. The unemployment rate for Mexican migrants in the U.S. peaked at 12% in 2009 and the poverty rate increased from about 20% in 2007 to 27% in 2009.

This type of news travels rapidly between immigrants in the U.S. and immigrant homelands in Mexico and Central America. If the prospects for economic advancement in the U.S. are dim, then potential immigrants will be less likely to leave their homelands and will bide their time until the U.S. economy improves.

Analysts’ findings that there has not been a mass exodus of undocumented immigrants from the U.S. back to Latin America support the argument that it’s a lack of jobs and not an overabundance of enforcement that has slowed illegal immigration.

Immigration research analysts also confirm that the main reason immigration has decreased is due to the recession, just as immigration has historically declined during most periods of high unemployment in the U.S. and surged when the economy creates jobs.

Although unprecedented enforcement certainly may be playing a part in deterring immigrants by making their lives more unpleasant in the U.S. and at the border, its role in the illegal immigration decrease is outweighed by the state of the economy and the lack of low-skill jobs typically filled by immigrants.

Arizona solidified its status this week as the capital of anti-immigrant legislation.

On Monday the Arizona Senate approved a measure that requires local law enforcement to determine an individual's legal status if there is a reasonable suspicion that he or she is an unauthorized immigrant.

Opponents of the measure claim that it requires police to engage in racial profiling. A New York Times editorial said that the Arizona legislature had “stepped off the deep end of the immigration debate,” adding that the law would do little to reduce unauthorized immigration and would distract local law enforcement.

The bill was passed after months of legislative debate, fueled in recent weeks by the killing of respected Arizona rancher Robert Krentz. Krentz was shot in late March near the border along a well-known narcotics smuggling route.

No arrests have been made in the murder, but political bloggers and talk-show hosts pounced on the issue, calling on the government to “secure the border.” The resulting Arizona state measure is another in a decades-long series of immigration legislation focused almost exclusively on enforcement.

This enforcement-only approach to immigration is particularly popular during times of high unemployment, but it ignores the root causes of migration in immigrants' countries of origin: poverty and a lack of jobs.

The lion’s share (81%) of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. are from Latin America, particularly Mexico and Central America. Almost half (47%) of Mexicans live in poverty and 18% are mired in extreme poverty, unable to meet their basic food needs. Economic conditions in Central America are even harsher.

Given the conditions pushing immigrants from these countries and the opportunities in the U.S., walls have not been effective in keeping them out. Border enforcement increased exponentially during the 1980s and 1990s, but unauthorized immigration simultaneously reached historic levels. The push of Latin American poverty and the pull of U.S. jobs trumps the billions spent on the border.

Border militarization has also inadvertently increased the amount of immigrants settling in the U.S. Until the 1980s immigration from Mexico was often circular, with migrants working for a period of time in the U.S. and returning to their homes with their savings for the rest of the year.

But as increased enforcement raised the costs of multiple border crossings, migrants have chosen to settle in the U.S. – and call for their family members to join them. Although the border has been ineffective in keeping out immigrants, it has been successful in locking them in.

There are now about 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Given the lack of opportunities for education and job growth, one in five (21%) unauthorized immigrant adults and one in three (33%) children of unauthorized immigrants – 73% of whom are U.S. citizens – live in poverty. In both cases these poverty rates are more than double the rates for those born in the U.S.

Although they are better off economically than in their home countries, immigrants in the U.S. face a mounting set of obstacles to their economic well-being and an increasing sense of being unwelcome.

The tragic killing in Arizona looks as if it will reinforce policies that criminalize immigrants in the U.S. while failing to address the root causes of migration both here and overseas.